Hard to say what the constituting difference is between my Sketches and Songs Without Words. If they feel like exercises or germs of tunes to be expanded, I call them Sketches. This started out as a sketch, but turned into something that feels whole enough to call a Song.
A very simple melody in D harmonic minor in A|B|A form that really gets defined by the harmony. The B section modulates out of the key, but the melody stays close to the D minor center before returning to the A section.
A nice distorted pad makes its way at the B section and provides some twisted harmonics.
As I’ve said a few times in posts, there’s a ton of great artists on Twitter sharing art and challenging each other. David Pringle started an ArtSwap last year with Twitter artists and there were great pieces churned out. The art from this year’s swap is going into a book and 50% of those profits are for a memorial fund for artist Kristen Esstensohn (My drawing may come off morbid in this light, but the recipient I was assigned had recently posted pumpkin patch pictures on her blog… wanted to take advantage of it).
Still strange how these portals shape the way we interact with each other, but it’s always refreshing to see people participating in positive/creative/etc. causes/projects/etc. like this ArtSwap.
A year ago today, I was busy not writing my novel for NANOWRIMO (National Novel Writing Month).
Today, I am remembering that this site runs on a blogging platform. Blogs that don’t update are dead. They have a dead sheen about them.
So here are some projects on the mind for this site and elsewhere.
Theory: posts putting it into practice with examples as I’ve done with a couple music sketches. Pages that break down rudiments of harmony with audio examples.
Improv: Not theatre. Continuing to post improvisations as I started earlier this year. Documenting thought through sound without pre-planning.
Bach: I took a look at his 371 Chorales yesterday for a couple hours. Loads to learn and such a wealth of harmony.
Melody: posting single-line melodies on a frequent basis that could turn into sketches or complete tunes.
New site for drawings: I’m going to be posting drawings on a new site. Something simple and blog-like, but solely for drawings. I’ll still post drawings with some tunes, but most of the drawings with captions are going to have a place of their own.
A boring business site: It’s funny, but yes, I am going to have a site for music services with samples and demos and probably a link back to this site. Something like a glorified business-card, while keeping on with my musings and cataloging here.
Tracing the Trail: This tune is posted as an acoustic draft with several vocals. I’ve dug up a larger arrangement of that tune and started to mix the many tracks. It’ll be a ways to go– I’m mixing the song for a class and it’s due next week– over twelve tracks of guitar so far, but I bet there’ll be thirty when it’s done. It’s over 8 minutes, with over 600 words, and ample room for guitar ornamentation. There’s even sections containing– god forbid… power chords!
Notation: My friend Dan Miraie has challenged me to notating the Star Wars score by John Williams, starting with the first two pages this week. I’d like to get my hands on Sibelius, but for now, I’m using Finale. [Plug: check out Dan's sonicsweatshop.com. Listen to his fine tunes along with the YouTube vids they pair with].
I’ll close this with an arrangement of the Gershwin tune Let’s Call It Off that Dan did last month. He didn’t score it for this cartoon, but it syncs up eerily in spots. Love the clip he included at the end of Louie Armstrong speaking:
See, you got a good tone, you phrase well– so what’cha wanna waste a whole lotta notes?… leave that to the people that make a thousand notes in order to get one good one.
Taking a generic electronic drum-loop, I turned the kick into a pulsating bass on G. Hand claps got split into an interval of a minor 10th (B and D), though I notated it as an octave of B… whoops. There was also a wood-block on F# and D, though it’s pretty electronic and not very distinct. The drums are basically pulsating on a G maj7 chord.
The strings come in and oscillate between I and perhaps a I+? … or you could call it some kind of diminished chord starting on Eb or A, but then the G in the bass throws me… if you have any suggestions as to what to call this chord, let me know.
This is a second concentrated effort at period and sentence structure (see Sketch #1 for the other example). The first 4 measures are a period, the next 4 measures a sentence, and the remaining measures restate the period with alternative harmonizations. The wurlitzer left-hand plays the counterpoint (though not according to strict traditional rules) and a few chords. The chord structure seems obvious in spots, but because the lines are constantly moving, it doesn’t make sense to analyze the chords beat-by-beat.
I’m trying to wrap my head around music analysis these days, and I quickly complicate myself when I start analyzing the harmony of a 4-part piece on every division of the beat. I usually can pick out the general chord structure, and I understand that passing tones and neighboring tones embellish the essence of the melody– they act as a kind of connective tissue as one teacher puts it– but, I often want to over-harmonize multiple lines. It’s a forest for the trees kind of thing.
The tune keeps happily ambiguous between A major and F# minor.
Warren from The Doodle Daily asked me what I’d written today and suggested I put a tune to his blog’s #429th drawing of a clown. I had other ideas I’ve been working on, but after he asked, I couldn’t stop thinking of this oom-pah-pah melody.
Organs in Ab, 3/4 time. Follows this progression: I (4x) | ii | V7 (of ii) | ii | I
Last semester, I enjoyed taking a class on non-linear video editing (any editing program on a computer is non-linear). The final project was to assemble something original from the archive footage on the school’s servers. I also edited a disturbing little trailer for the movie The Adjuster, a music video, and a couple scenes from an episode of Law & Order SVU using the original takes. I’d post the Law & Order, but I’d rather not go through the trouble and be asked to take it down. Donaji posted a slide-show of her crafts which included a copyrighted song, and was contacted by a third-party to take it down, so…
A lot of ideas for The Vital Spirit Mechanism spawned from watching a trilogy of philosophy videos that gave an overview on the evolution of thought. “Vital spirit” was a way of explaining life and the soul without resorting to science or anything physical, so including mechanism in the title is a play on it. Ancient Greek physiology stated that,
…air enters the body, is then drawn by the lungs into the heart, where it is transformed into vital spirit, and is then pumped by the arteries throughout the body. Some of this vital spirit reaches the brain, where it is transformed into animal spirit, which is then distributed by the nerves.
The Greeks of old also dissected criminals while they were still breathing as a humanitarian effort to further medicine.
The project is about the melding of music, math, and machine by speaking and audibly understanding binary code. Wonderfully preposterous… until it happens. I wrote out the narration and made a text-to-audio file with my Mac’s Automator. The voice was actually on the Victoria setting, but I manipulated it with effects and it resulted in sounding like a male.
The hours of life required to edit minutes of assorted footage into viewable entertainment is depressing. Similarly, recording and editing music is an egregious process of hours of work for minutes of product. You slave your soul to create a piece of music. You slave hours to record a demo of it for people to hear. You then have a hard time keeping their attention while they wash dishes or maybe dismiss it because it’s not a serious record on a label with distribution.
The class was a nice introduction to Final Cut Pro. I want to save up and purchase the program for future projects like editing home-movies.
A year ago today, I was busy not writing my novel for 
